Women are silenced online, just as in real life. It will take more than Twitter to change that

Up to 80% of comments on some news sites are left by men. How does that shape what editors believe to be public opinion?

‘The reasons why women aren’t visible in comments sections are complex and intertwined. Outspoken women are more likely to get abused online. Many women are still doing the primary family management and caring roles, so don’t have time.’
Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA

Twitter’s new measures to control bad behaviour are a good start in tackling the abuse that is driving women away from speaking out online.

But commenting on the news remains an adversarial pursuit that many women shun, so ways of managing it need serious rethinking if media companies hope to increase their audience engagement.

A study I ran of online news commenting in the UK, US and Australia, indicates that even in moderated comments sections, men dominate the posts. It also suggests women commenters may be adopting pseudonyms to avoid gender stereotyping and abuse.

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The research involved the capture, computational and content analysis of 9m comments made on homepage news and opinion stories from 15 news services, including the Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post and Sydney Morning Herald, public service broadcasters the BBC, NPR and ABC, and newer sites like the Huffington Post, the Conversationand Texas Tribune.

It found that contributors with female user names generally make up less than a third, and as low as 3% (in the case of theGuardian) of the top commenters. They were also less likely to be represented among those who posted most often.

The findings were consistent across digital native sites, as well as legacy print and broadcast-based services. They applied to international, metropolitan and local publications.

So it seems that women’s relative absence is not the result of individual toxic commenting cultures but has broader social and cultural dimensions.

It certainly has political and social ramifications because these sections often get presented as a snapshot of public opinion, and they guide editors’ and journalists’ ideas of what readers value and what is worthwhile to cover.

It’s also a worry for businesses that need to build audiences to survive, and for analytics companies that want to understand more about user behaviours through data mining comments.

We first spotted the gender imbalance when my research team isolated the top 100 commenters for each site, over three months in mid 2014.

I then coded all contributor names as being male, female, or ambiguous/pseudonymous – and found more male identified names in every instance, even the Daily Mail, whose audience skews female and which covers more “soft”, lifestyle news.

Certainly some women, in a 19th century manoeuvre, may be taking male pen names to avoid being gender stereotyped. But where companies were using Facebook or another real-name, social networking platform for their comments, the percentage of female-identifying users was still only between 17%-22%.

It’s more likely that many women are adopting gender neutral names for protection. The Guardian and the Washington Post had among the lowest rates of female identified commenters (3% and 6%) but the highest levels of pseudonym use.

Gender of commenter names: International and metropolitan news services, top 100 commenters

The reasons why women aren’t visible in comments sections are complex and intertwined. Outspoken women are more likely to get abused online. Many women are still doing the primary family management and caring roles, so don’t have time. On the other hand, women are bigger users than men of Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest, platforms that offer a public voice in a personally controlled social environment.

One key problem is that news media have built – in the interests of objectivity and cost management – unresponsive systems, where moderators silently delete, block and ban rather than facilitate conversation, and journalists don’t take part.

Yet the Engaging News project at the University of Texas has found that civility increases when journalists interact with their audiences.

In another study I’m working on now, called Mediating the Conversation, I’ve found that the site with the highest degree of female-identified interaction – 35% of top commenters are women – was the Texas Tribune, a lively political news journal that has the state’s largest reporting team and an international name for reporting on reproductive rights.

Tribuneeditorial administrator John Jordan told me when he first took on the comments section it was an “awful space, full of free range trolls”. He said he patrolled it like a street cop with a stick and when regulars complained about being banned he would explain how they needed to behave.

Jordan, who handles much of the moderation, will answer questions or clarify points. He tries to ensure that the first comments posted, which set the tone of discussion, are not needlessly negative.

The site’s Tribtalk section now boasts a “respect” button, which encourages people to endorse comments they may not like but are willing to acknowledge.

Jordan says all these things contribute to a more inclusive commenting culture, but he’s keen for the Tribune to do better and develop world’s best approaches to gender, age and race participation. And if digital Texas can show us something that’s better, instead of bigger, that’s a mighty fine idea.